Wednesday, February 13, 2013

DINOSAUR JR, BugMelody Maker, October 8th 1988

by Simon Reynolds

I’ve
no time for the fully-rounded character in rock, all those aspiring
spokesmen like Bragg, That Petrol Emotion, Sting, Bono, Stuart Adamson,
who try to straddle the personal and the political, and divide their
energy equally between healthy desire and adult concern. No, the
interesting things in rock are coming from one-dimensional characters at
either extreme of the spectrum--either the selflessly militant or the
dormant self-absorbed. On one side, the fanatic survivalists (Public
Enemy, Front 242, Metallica), who are physically and musically stripped
down, disciplined and on-the-one. On the other, the defeatists and
drifters (Nick Cave, Morrissey, Vini Reilly) or the langorous
absentees-from-reality (My Bloody Valentine, AR Kane).

No
prizes for guessing which camp Dinosaur Jr flop into. J. Mascis’
lethargy is legendary, verging on cliché, and something he no doubt
plays up slightly for the microphone. If Morrissey is “half a person”,
Mascis consists of some even smaller fraction of a whole and healthy
human. And Bug, basically a slightly more emphatic and vivid replay of last year’s You’re Livin’ All Over Me, is another document of a “life” that seems to be drained and devoid of all the zestful crackle that word usually suggests.

In
many ways Dinosaur Jr’s “concerns” are the eternal preoccupations and
stumbling blocks of parochial US youth: how to kickstart your life;
feelings of claustrophobia; the chasm between Amercan dreams and
American reality; vacillation in the face of your obligation to yourself
to wrench free in search of something better. These impasses have been
“dealt” with (that’s to say, not resolved, just suspended in glorious
mid-air between hope and despair), many times before, most superlatively
by Husker Du and The Replacements. What’s different about Dinosaur Jr
is the extremity of their apathy (for Mascist, the struggle isn’t to get
away but to get out of bed) and a particular iridescence that veins
their grey gusting guitars, little rainbow refractions in the glum,
hurtling stormclouds.

Like most great miserabilists,
the limits of Mascis’ voice shape his melodies--which are all chips off
the same block, all unmistakeably Dinosaur Jr, all just a little bit déjà vu. The effect is rather comforting, but the samey-ness adds to the feeling that with Dinosaur Jr we never really “go” anywhere.

“No
Bones” could almost be a “manifesto’ for the group. When I interviewed
them, I remarked on Mascis’ boneless, rag doll sheepishness, on how it
was the appropriate demeanour for someone whose life lacked any kind of
spiritual spine. But in another sense, Dinosaur Jr are dissolving rock’s
vertebrae, as the riff, powerchord and bassline are almost lost in a
blizzard of violently serrated haze.

“Don’t”, the last
track, is where the caustic dreaminess of their sound is at its most
sulphuric and psychedelic. It’s a gorgeous cataract of opalescent
Hendrix guitar, through which is blasted the soiling, scorching hurt of
the repeated plaint--“WHY? WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME?”--bellowed by what
sounds like a voice put through a fuzzbox.

In their
strange combination of urgency and ennui, bang and whimper, Dinosaur Jr
are the latest angle on one of the oldest rock themes: “I don’t live
today.” But understand that this lifeless life, this fogginess of the
depths of torpor, this blurry indistinctness of the edges between
yourself and the world that comes with inaction--all this is the
necessary grey shrinkage of consciousness you must go through before you
get to dream up the kind of visionary new colours that Dinosaur Jr
drizzle down on us almost absentmindedly.